Candida Lycett Green - obituary - Telegraph Nicholas Luard 27 May 2004 This almost fogeyish persona contrasted with the one presented by the tall, lissom blonde Candida Lycett Green in the 1960s, when she and her Old Etonian husband, Rupert Lycett Green, were at the heart of the London party scene. Candida was an habitué of the Establishment Club, where she was photographed with the actor Terence Stamp; Rupert was the founder of Blades, the fashionable gentlemen’s outfitters in Mayfair. Ossie Clark designed Candida’s dresses, and David Hockney painted her portrait . In a reference to Candida’s reputation for minting sardonic witticisms, the couple were known as “Tailor and Cutter”. As editor of her father’s letters, Candida Lycett Green did not consider herself a particularly meticulous scholar but rather a voracious snapper-up of his considered and unconsidered trifles.

The writer and poet Blake Morrison delighted in her “often dotty and Betjemanic” footnotes, and found that her affectionate linking passages between the sections “add up to a charming memoir in themselves”. In the first of two hefty volumes, John Betjeman Letters, 1926-1951 (1994), she recalled that all his working life her father had been strapped for cash. In the 1960s, when his fame was well-established, he had sold all his papers and letters — past and future — to the highest bidder, the newly created University of Victoria in British Columbia. In February 1992 Candida travelled to Victoria, and in the university’s McPherson Library “found several corridors of grey four-drawer filing cabinets containing, as it were, my father”.

Closeted in her allotted researcher’s cubbyhole, Candida Lycett Green found her father’s life tumbling out across the table in front of her — “notes from Oxford friends, garage bills, rockets from librarians for not returning books” — and she returned to England with more than 2,000 photocopies of letters to her father (there were about 50,000 altogether). Once home, she advertised for her father’s outgoing letters and wrote to hundreds of universities and libraries as well as to 420 individuals. The response was huge and humbling. She received hundreds of letters, not just from friends and acquaintances but also from strangers. “It was like Christmas every morning,” she recalled, “and this lasted for at least four months. A whole new life began to evolve.” The first volume of her father’s letters covered his life in London and Oxford and at his parents’ holiday home at Trebetherick, Cornwall; his marriage to her mother, Penelope Chetwode, and their early years together in Uffington, Ireland and Farnborough.

Volume two, John Betjeman Letters, 1951-1984 (1995), began with the family’s move to Wantage in Berkshire and her father taking a small flat at 43 Cloth Fair in the City of London. Candida admitted that her task as editor had been sadder and harder than before, when for the most part she had stood apart from the people and events described in her father’s correspondence. Now she found that she was fully conscious of, and completely involved with, her subject. The second volume of letters was also difficult to compile because in the 1960s Betjeman’s abysmal handwriting had become almost indecipherable even to the most practised transcribers. Then there was the sheer volume of documents, which she said would fill an articulated lorry. When she returned to the University of Victoria in British Columbia for a second time, she was faced with distilling the essence of her father’s life from no fewer than 30,000 letters that she had not seen two years before.

Candida Lycett Green in the garden of her home in Wiltshire (Andrew Crowley) Candida Rose Betjeman was born on September 22 1942 in Dublin, where John Betjeman was planning to spend the war as press attaché to the British representative in the Irish Republic. But the family returned to Britain the following year, and his daughter spent her infancy at Garrards Farm, the rented, chaotic family home near Wantage that Evelyn Waugh complained smelled like a village shop: “oil, cheese, bacon, washing… A horse sleeps in the kitchen.” Furthermore, the family goat, Snowdrop, was allowed the run of the house, which was hung with Pre-Raphaelite paintings, decorated with William Morris wallpapers and lit solely by oil lamps. The infant’s maternal grandfather, Field Marshal Lord Chetwode, would never stay under his daughter’s roof, always putting up at a pub across the road, unable to stand “those stinkin’ lamps”. When Candida was three, the family moved again, to the Old Rectory at Farnborough, a remote village on the Berkshire downs that became “my favourite place on earth”.

A pretty, fair-haired child, she was her father’s pet; he called her “Wibz”. The girl showed early literary talent, and made her father laugh with an early limerick: “Wibberley Wobberley Wib/She blew up her dad with a squib/And when he was dead/She cut off his head/And scratched on his face with a nib.” Candida’s mother, Penelope, newly converted to Roman Catholicism, regularly took Candida to Mass while allowing her to remain at a local Anglican primary school, where she mixed with local children and acquired a Berkshire accent which she shed completely only when she was in her teens. As a girl she learned to love the pace of life on horseback, “wandering through villages, the backs of towns… looking into gardens and watching other people’s lives”. According to her father’s biographer, Bevis Hillier, Candida never forgave her parents for moving from their beautiful Georgian rectory downhill to red-brick Wantage and a Victorian house called The Mead, which she hated. But she was allowed to be naughtier than her contemporaries, mainly on account of the benign neglectfulness of her parents.

“I’m sure it came as a shock to John, sometimes, to realise he’d got children,” a neighbour remarked. After boarding at St Mary’s, Wantage, Candida left in 1957 at the age of 15. She enjoyed extended cultural holidays in Paris and Rome, and in 1958 spent some months with a French family in the Haute-Loire area of central France, attending the local school and complaining about the stern, unbending teaching methods there. The following year she went to Rome to study architecture, and at New Year 1960 returned to Italy again to recover from a failed love affair. At 17 she was sending reams of “appallingly bad” poetry to her father in England for his critical verdict; she always found him a good listener. After a year’s sojourn in Ireland in 1961, she came out as a debutante, much to the disapproval of her father, who thought she would be better off finding a job.

Candida decided in the circumstances to flee the family nest and moved to Oxford, where she studied sculpture at the city’s technical college and, in a greasy-spoon café called the Town and Gown, mooned after Richard Ingrams, with whom she later helped launch Private Eye in London. Her start in journalism was unpromising. Having persuaded Queen magazine to give her a job as an £8-a-week sub-editor, writing captions under pictures of fur coats and jewellery, she was fired in September 1962 by the owner, Jocelyn Stevens, who had discovered that in the evenings Candida was moonlighting on the Eye, stapling the magazine’s pages together to prepare it for distribution. Later that autumn she was a guest at a house party at a palazzo in Venice thrown by Simon Hornby, one of her many admirers and subsequently chairman of WH Smith, and there she met and fell in love with the handsome Rupert Lycett Green. Back home, while Candida was working in north Wales for Richard Hughes, author of A High Wind In Jamaica (1929), she and Rupert became engaged.

They married in May 1963, and after a honeymoon at Ravello spent a year driving around the world in a customised Land Rover. On their return, her husband founded Blades, with premises in Savile Row. (He sold it in 1981.) Candida Lycett Green with her father on her wedding day in 1963 (TOPFOTO.CO.UK) The Lycett Greens set up home in the then deeply unfashionable area of Notting Hill. Candida decorated it in the “boho” style, and installed, in the basement, one of the first country kitchens in London. Its “pine look” commended itself to art directors, who used it as a film location for commercials ranging from Hovis bread to Viyella shirts. The L-shaped drawing room was painted emerald green and furnished with purple sofas. After its faltering start, Candida’s journalistic career began to flourish. In June 1970 the Evening Standard sent her to Mexico to report on the football World Cup from a woman’s angle.

As the decade progressed, she succeeded her father as steward of the “Nooks and Corners” column that he had started in Private Eye, and revealed an unsuspected talent for investigative reporting; she was once threatened with physical violence by a rogue building “developer”, and was the first woman to become a regular Eye contributor. In 1974 she and her husband moved to Blacklands, near Calne, a large, crumbling Georgian house overlooking the Marlborough downs whose top two floors had been gutted by fire. To help finance the renovation and improvements, Candida sold Hockney’s portrait of her , paying for a tennis court in the garden. When the couple hosted a 70th birthday party for her father at Blacklands in the blisteringly hot summer of 1976, Candida noted how heavily the poet leaned on his wife’s arm, and that he had become “pretty wobbly”. It was John Betjeman’s idea that his daughter’s book The Front Garden (1974), compiled with the photographer Christopher Simon Sykes, would make an interesting television film.

Candida Lycett Green presented it on Christmas Day 1978, the film having been directed by Eddie Mirzoeff and shot by Philip Bonham-Carter, John Betjeman’s own regular television team. Mirzoeff suggested that she make another film with him, the result being The English Woman and the Horse (1981). She continued to turn out more books with a rural theme, including A Cottage in the Country (1983), English Cottages (1984), Brilliant Gardens (1989), The Perfect English Country House (1991) and Seaside Resorts (2011). In the 1990s she served on the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England. In 1997 Candida Lycett Green edited an anthology of her father’s prose, Coming Home, and in 1999 an anthology of prose and verse, Betjeman’s Britain. After being diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999, she produced The Garden at Highgrove (2000), a book she deliberately signed up for as a project to sustain her and which she shared with her friend the Prince of Wales.

Her memoir of growing up in rural Berkshire, The Dangerous Edge of Things, appeared in 2005. Candida Lycett Green, a lifelong horsewoman, continued to take a week or two off each year, as she had done for 30 years, to ride all over England. She reckoned that she had covered more than 3,000 miles “touring England by horse” . In August 2000 she rode from Yorkshire to north Northumberland, a sponsored ride of 170 miles that raised £125,000 for the Abernethy Cancer Centre at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford, where she was treated. She recounted the journey in another memoir, Over the Hills and Far Away (2002). She had made plans for her funeral. “Axl [her horse] is going to pull our green trolley cart with a wooden coffin with horseshoes, and there are going to be gospel singers singing O Happy Day and a huge wake, with lots of dancing. I’ve got it all sorted — one might as well.” She is survived by Rupert Lycett Green and by three daughters and two sons.

Candida Lycett Green, born September 22 1942, died August 19 2014 About | Candida Lycett Green Contact Candida (left) and her best friend Tory Lawrence on the Uffington White Horse. Photo credit: Geraint Lewis for The Independent magazine Candida was born in Dublin in 1942. She was the daughter of the poet, author and broadcaster John Betjeman and Penelope Chetwode, author and Himalayan traveler/explorer. As a child, Candida and her mother travelled on horses or in a horse-drawn cart along green lanes and tracks and her love of exploring England has never left her. In 1960 she performed at the Edinburgh fringe festival with her friends, Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton and Andrew Osmond who were about to start Private Eye. She subsequently worked as a sub editor on Queen and in the evenings helped collate and staple together the first copies of Private Eye and distribute publicity posters for it in the Underground. Queen’s editor Jocelyn Stevens discovered she was moonlighting and sacked her.

In 1962 she married Rupert Lycett Green, described by her as “a romantic maverick”, and had five children. He had recently started a men’s tailoring shop called ‘Blades’ which was to take a seminal place in the history of men’s fashion. Candida wrote two children’s books Hadrian the Hedgehog and Hadrian in the Orient and continued to work as a journalist. In 1970 she covered the World Cup in Mexico for the Evening Standard and took over the column Nooks and Corners in Private Eye which had been created by Richard Ingrams for her father. As a result of this column she and Private Eye colleague Christopher Booker wrote Goodbye London because they were so shocked at what the planners and developers were doing. During the 1970s she conceived, wrote and presented three acclaimed television documentaries: The Front Garden and The Englishwoman and the Horse for the BBC and English Cottages for Channel Four. She published The Front Garden, English Cottages, (which sold over 100,000 copies), The Perfect English Country House and Brilliant Gardens.

In the 1980s she spent seven years editing and introducing her father’s letters and prose with connecting passages. “I know I have an onerous task,” she wrote, “ but I love my father and want to show the world how great he was; how he was, unlike most of us, interested in things other than himself; how he revealed the divine in the ordinary and enriched so many people’s lives; how he laughed an inordinate amount and when he put his head back and opened his mouth and shook with laughter you couldn’t help laughing too; how he joked about the clergy and obscure denominations and above all how strongly he believed.

I want to show how my father is not categorizable; how his architectural tastes were catholic and all-embracing, from the stone dwellings on St Kilda to the wild buildings of Gaudi and the brick galleries of Jim Stirling; how he did not necessarily love all things Victorian as is popularly supposed , but a carefully selected proportion; how he never accepted the mediocre and how he was England’s grand champion not of conservation with all the stuffiness and fossilizing academicism that the word now implies, but of safeguarding what he called ‘indeterminate beauty’ – the last thing on any official list, because of its indefinable quality”. She later edited Betjeman’s Britain for the Folio Society and wrote 100 English Houses illustrated with pictures from the Country Life Archives. Candida was a Commissioner for English Heritage between 1992 and 2001 and also served as a member of their Audit Committee as well as their Churches and Cathedrals Committee. Between 1975 and 1990 she and her husband were responsible for the day-to-day running of a thoroughbred stud farm. Together they bred the winners of sixty races.

When Richard Ingrams started The Oldie magazine in 1992 he created a column for Candida called Unwrecked England. Selections of the articles have resulted in two books. In 1999 she travelled north on a horse for 200 miles raising £125,000 for the complementary health centre in Oxford’s Churchill Cancer Hospital and wrote the best-selling Over the Hills and Far Away about the journey. The Dangerous Edge of Things followed – a year in her downland village childhood. Candida won the Countryfile Writer of the Year Award in 2011. Candida was a contributing editor of Vogue. She was a member of the MCPS through her song writing lyrics, Patron of the Dance Scholarship Trust , a Vice President of the Churches Conservation Trust , on the advisory board of the Railway Heritage Trust , and a member of the Waddesdon Garden Committee . She was also Chair of the Betjeman Poetry Prize . Candida died in August 2014 from pancreatic cancer. She was a supporter and fundraiser for Pancreatic Cancer Action . This website uses cookies. Your continued use of the site implies your consent has been given.

Candida Lycett Green: Author who helped 'Private Eye' get off the ground and edited the letters and prose of her father, John Betjeman | The Independent Candida Lycett Green: Author who helped 'Private Eye' get off the ground and edited the letters and prose of her father, John Betjeman Wednesday 20 August 2014 23:00 BST Click to follow The Independent Online Lycett Green, centre, with the Duchess of Cornwall, right, in 2011 Getty Images Candida Lycett Green was a writer of limpid, graceful English prose with 16 books to her name; a champion of the English countryside and its buildings, both as a weekly columnist for The Oldie and as Commissioner of English Heritage; a strikingly beautiful television presenter; a loving, generous friend and hostess who relished introducing her chums to each other; a devoted mother who was herself the daughter of celebrated parents; a fine horsewoman; an elegant gardener and decorator; a splendid cook; a richly funny conversationalist who would begin telephone calls with the greeting, "Mrs Green here"; and part of the original group who started Private Eye.

She also composed song lyrics and comic verse, and edited – to critical acclaim – two volumes of the letters of her father, John Betjeman, and an anthology of his prose (Coming Home, 1997). She was born in Dublin in 1942, where Betjeman was press attaché at the British Embassy. An elder brother, Paul, had been born in 1937. Their mother, the Hon Penelope Chetwode (1910-86), daughter of Field Marshall Sir Philip, later Lord Chetwode, was herself a well-known writer, and (says Candida's website) "Himalayan traveller/explorer". Returning to England, the family went from Uffington to Farnborough and then to Wantage. There, mother and daughter (whom the parents called "Wibz") explored the "green lanes and tracks" of this part of England on horseback or in a horse-drawn cart. In her teens Candida competed – fiercely and successfully – in pony club events. Following school at St Mary's Wantage, she did a course in sculpture at a technical college in Oxford, where she met the undergraduates John Wells and Richard Ingrams.

In 1960 she performed on the Edinburgh Fringe with Ingrams, Willie Rushton and Andrew Osmond, who were on the verge of founding Private Eye. While working as a sub on Queen, she spent her evenings collating and stapling the first issues of the satirical magazine, until the editor of Queen, Jocelyn Stevens, discovered she was moonlighting and sacked her. On 25 May 1960 Candida married the tall, handsome "romantic maverick" Rupert Lycett Green, who ran a bespoke tailoring business, Blades, at the foot of Savile Row, which combined the traditional craft and skill of its address with the radical fashions of the 1960s. It was also a social statement, said by a Daily Telegraph journalist "to typify the revolt of the upper class young." Blades made clothes for John Aspinall, Terence Stamp, the Beatles (and young men like me, hoping that our Blades suits conferred some of the cachet of Rupert's better-known clients).

The dazzling couple (they had five children) was at the heart of Swinging London, and they were seen at the best parties, along with their friends, the Snowdons, the Shands and the Parker Bowleses. From 1975-1990 the pair ran a thoroughbred stud, where they bred the winners of 60 races. Rupert chose to be a tailor, and Candida had a parallel attitude: "I needed to get a job and earn my living, and as I was quite good at English at school and writing was part of my parents' trade it seemed obvious. I saw it as a craft I could do rather than being inspiration-driven." Despite the glamour of her background and marriage, the family always had to look after themselves financially. Her first novel was "a children's book, which was commissioned by a publishing company that collapsed before it was finished." Several publishers rejected Hadrian the Hedgehog before one took it: "You don't get published just because you're the daughter of famous writers, and I refused to use my maiden name anyway… I was a feminist in the Sixties, but I had no problem with taking my husband's name.

It was about the only thing I wasn't a feminist about." In 1970 the Evening Standard sent her to Mexico to cover the football World Cup, and she took over the Private Eye column about the built environment, "Nooks and Corners", that Richard Ingrams had established for her father. There she met Christopher Booker, with whom she wrote Goodbye London, which reflected their shock at what developers were planning, and planners allowing. In the 1970s she devised, wrote and presented three much-admired documentaries; for the BBC she did The Front Garden and The Englishwoman and the Horse; and for Channel Four, English Cottages, with a book of the same title that sold more than 100,000 copies. She also wrote the TV tie-in book The Front Garden, as well as The Perfect English Country House and Brilliant Gardens. At the time of his death in 1984, Sir John Betjeman was Poet Laureate and a bona fide national treasure. Candida spent seven years editing his letters and prose, writing introductions and connecting passages.

She wanted to show readers what she saw as the secret of his greatness: "He was, unlike most of us, interested in things other than himself." For his centenary in 2006 she organised events all over the country. A typical occasion was her presentation of a volume of Betjeman poems to the Mayor of Slough. She worked with Richard Ingrams "on and off for fifty years… He created [the] 'Unwrecked England' column for me when he started The Oldie [in 1992]. The idea of turning it into a book was there right from the start because that's how he got me to agree to write it, saying that when I'd written 100 columns he would turn it into a book." Following cancer treatment, in 1999 she rode a horse north for 200 miles, raising £125,000 for Oxford's Churchill Cancer Hospital, and in 2002 published a best-seller about the journey, Over the Hills and Far Away. Another autobiographical work (2005) was The Dangerous Edge of Things, a poignant account of a year in the downland village of her childhood.

To celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary, at their house near Uffington, Rupert and Candida held a full-size replica village fête, complete with Hit-the-Bell, dog show, gymkhana and ice cream van. Her good humour was matched by her candour. In late July she tweeted her 1,500 followers with a pitch to support her daughter and grandson on a sponsored bike ride: "I'm near the end of the road with inoperable pancreatic cancer." It was one of life's privileges to be her friend. PAUL LEVY Candida Rose Betjeman, writer: born Dublin 22 September 1942; married 1960 Rupert Lycett Green (two sons, three daughters); died 19 August 2014.

Candida Lycett Green: Poet Laureate’s daughter loved life and countryside (From Oxford Mail) Jobs Business Directory Local Info Dating Buy Sell Book an Ad Candida Lycett Green: Poet Laureate’s daughter loved life and countryside Candida Lycett Green and her husband Rupert with her father, Sir John Betjeman, right, after her wedding at SS Peter & Paul Church, Wantage, in 1963 Lycett Green Candida - Mémoires de Guerre Mémoires de Guerre Lycett Green Candida 20 Août 2015 Candida Rose Lycett Green (née Betjeman; 22 September 1942 – 19 August 2014) was a British author who wrote sixteen books including English Cottages, Goodbye London, The Perfect English House, Over the Hills and Far Away and The Dangerous Edge of Things. Her television documentaries included The Englishwoman and the Horse, and The Front Garden. Unwrecked England, based on a regular column of the same name she wrote for The Oldie since 1992, was published in 2009.

Lycett Green has been described as "the finest writer of our time on the English countryside". She edited and introduced her father John Betjeman’s letters and prose in three volumes to critical acclaim. She was a commissioner of English Heritage for nine years and her proudest achievement was the role she played in the regeneration of Chatterley Whitfield Colliery, Stoke-On-Trent. She was a member of the Performing Rights Society through her writing of lyrics for songs and was a Contributing Editor to Vogue from 1987. She was part of the original team who started Private Eye. Nicky Haslam nominated Lycett Green as the living person he most admired ("beautiful, brave, strong, clever, loving and loved"). Candida Rose Betjeman was born on 22 September 1942 in Dublin where her father, John Betjeman (later Sir John), was wartime press attaché at the British Embassy. Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, a friend of her father, celebrated her birth with a poem "Candida". Her mother, the Hon.

Penelope Valentine Hester Betjeman (née Chetwode; 1910–1986), was the daughter of Field-Marshal Sir Philip Chetwode (later Lord Chetwode) (1869–1950). Her paternal grandparents, Ernest and Mabel ("Bess") Betjemann (her father dispensed with the second "n"), died in 1934 and 1951 respectively. In 2007 Candida attributed to Ernest Betjemann, said by her father to be a hater of verse, a poem found in the log book of a yacht he had sailed on the Norfolk Broads in the 1920s. She regretted not asking her father more about his parents: "but it's not vital when you're young". An elder brother, Paul, was born in 1937.

The Betjemans returned to England in 1943, moving from Uffington to Farnborough, Berkshire in 1945, and then to Wantage in 1951 (Uffington and Wantage were part of Berkshire at the time, but are now part of Oxfordshire). Known to her parents as "Wibz", Candida was educated at St Mary's, Wantage. In her teens she rode ponies competitively; on one occasion, her distinguished father, having spelt out his surname for the purpose of sending a telegram, was asked by a local telephonist if he were "any relation of the little girl who wins all the prizes at the horse shows". She took a course in sculpture at a technical college in Oxford. There she met John Wells and Richard Ingrams, then undergraduates at Oxford University, who, shortly afterwards, founded the satirical magazine Private Eye, to which she became a regular contributor.

Ingrams, who had gone up to Oxford after National Service, was disappointed to find that it was (as he put it) "just a lot of men in duffel coats wandering up and down the High Street", while another Eye journalist Paul Foot, not known for hyperbole, described Candida as "the most beautiful woman in Oxford". On 25 May 1963, Candida Betjeman married Rupert Lycett Green, a rising figure in the tailoring business, whose shop Blades opened first in Dover Street, London and later in Savile Row. His particular kind of entrepreneurship was said at the time to "typify the revolt of the upper class young". The couple had five children. During the "swinging" sixties the Lycett Green family was associated with members of London’s "in" crowd, Blades being frequented by many stars of the period, including the Beatles, actor Terence Stamp and John Aspinall, founder of the Clermont Club. In 1967, she wrote a poem called the Knightsbridge Ballade that was evocative of the period.

In this, the subject (aged 18 as opposed to the poet’s 25) declared that she was "frightfully keen" on Terence Stamp and wished she had a bigger bust: "Though Mummy says it's frightfully smart/And any more would beckon lust". Lycett Green edited two volumes of her father’s letters (1994–95) and an anthology of his prose, Coming Home (1997). In the second volume of letters she described herself as a hoarder of correspondence (unlike her brother) and referred to her late father (with her husband) as her best friend. Lycett Green contributed to a number of magazines, including Queen (from which she was dismissed because of her association with Private Eye), Vogue, Country Life and The Oldie. Lycett Green shared some of her father's campaigning zeal, as regards, in particular, the perceived erosion of England's fabric.

They both found an outlet in the "Nooks and Corners" column in Private Eye (to which Betjeman was the first contributor in 1971) and she later contributed to "Unwrecked England" in The Oldie (also founded by Richard Ingrams). In an article in Country Life in 2003 she identified several aspects of English life which had become "universal fixtures in our mind's eye": cricket on the village green, Trooping the Colour, bands playing in a town park, the Women's Institute singing Jerusalem, pearly kings and queens at the Lord Mayor's show and discussions about the weather over a pint of beer in the local pub. In her autobiography, Over the Hills and Far Away, she writes about her experiences with cancer. In 2006, Lycett Green organised various events to mark the centenary of her father’s birth. These included a gala at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London and a jamboree in Cornwall for eight thousand people.

There were excursions by train from London to Bristol and, through "Metro-land", to Quainton Road; Lycett Green unveiled a commemorative plaque at Marylebone station to mark Betjeman's fond association with the railways. Presenting the Mayor of Slough, Berkshire, with a book of her father's poems, she made clear that he had regretted his mildly notorious poem of 1937: Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough, It isn't fit for humans now. Lycett Green wrote about the organisation of these various events, noting the intricacies of the rail schedules ("How long will the train stop at Ruislip so that [the poem] Middlesex can be read over the tannoy?") and being followed around Cornwall by a television crew ("I have had a microphone down my bra for almost two days now"). In 2007 Lycett Green was a member of "an alarmingly grown up" panel of judges to select a sculptor (Martin Jennings) for a bronze statue of her father that was erected on the concourse of the redeveloped St. Pancras station in London.

Candida Lycett Green died at the age of 71 on 19 August 2014 from pancreatic cancer. She was survived by her husband Rupert and their five children, Lucy, Imogen, Endellion, David and John. Liz | Liz 21 August 2014 Liz I jog around the park I still have arthritis in my left knee, but I manage to get round the park. A wettish day. We go and pick up some plants from Liz Scrabble: I win, but get just over 400. perhaps Mary will win tomorrow.

108 Games Mary win 57 John 51 Obituary: Candida Lycett Green – obituary Candida Lycett Green was an author and journalist who shared with her father, Sir John Betjeman, a passion for conserving England’s architectural heritage Candida Lycett Green in the garden of her home in Wiltshire in 2002 Photo: Andrew Crowley 6:22PM BST 20 Aug 2014 Sir John Betjeman's daughter Candida Lycett Green reveals tragic secret | Daily Mail Online comments What would the late Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman have made of this? His daughter, Candida Lycett Green, has just announced on Twitter that she is dying of cancer. Writer Candida, a close chum of the Prince of Wales and The Beatles, has known since Christmas that she has pancreatic cancer, but had kept the news to herself and a few friends and family. Now, however, her daughter, Imogen, and grandson, Ivo, have set out on a sponsored charity bike ride and Candida, 71, has decided it will be a good opportunity to raise money for Pancreatic Cancer Action.

‘I’m near the end of the road with inoperable pancreatic cancer,’ Candida tweets. ‘Please sponsor daughter & grandson on PC bike ride.’ Wedding day: Sir John Betjeman (right), with his daughter Candida Lycett Green and her husband Rupert. Candida has just announced on Twitter that she is dying of cancer Secret: Writer Candida, a close chum of the Prince of Wales and The Beatles, has known since Christmas that she has pancreatic cancer, but had kept the news to herself and a few friends and family More from Sebastian Shakespeare for the Daily Mail... VIEW FULL ARCHIVE Lycett Green has never been short of admirers — socialite and interior designer Nicky Haslam once named her as the living person he most admired (‘beautiful, brave, strong, clever, loving and loved’). She and her husband, former Savile Row tailor Rupert Lycett Green, were among the movers and shakers of the Sixties — her biggest regret was ‘not going the whole hog with Mick Jagger’ — and she followed in her father’s footsteps by writing about architectural and environmental matters, and is the author of 16 books.

Her grandfather Field Marshal Chetwode told John Betjeman when he became his son-in-law: ‘You needn’t call me Sir, you can call me Field Marshal.’ Candida’s daughter, Imogen, former wife of Glyndebourne boss Gus Christie, and her son Ivo are bicycling from Dunkirk to Brussels via Ypres and Ghent. ‘My mother, Candida, was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer on Christmas Eve 2013, and Ivo and I have decided to dedicate our 250km ride to Mum,’ says Imogen. ‘Mum was supposed to survive two to six months from diagnosis. She is still alive (hoorah!) and being so bloody brave, but her only path now is to manage the symptoms and the pain.’ How billionaires get a takeaway Having regained his position as the richest person in the world, Bill Gates can afford to push the boat out on his summer hols. The Microsoft founder, thought to be worth £45 billion, has been chartering a spectacular £195 million superyacht off the coast of Corsica.

The Serene, owned by Russian vodka tsar Yuri Scheffler, boasts a gym, cinema, two swimming pools, Jacuzzi, submarine hangar and two helipads. It was from one of these that Gates launched a helicopter sortie to nearby restaurant Chez Mico, where, I’m told, the billionaire touched down, played tennis in the grounds of the eaterie, then returned to The Serene with his takeaway dinner. Pushing the boat out: Bill Gates (pictured right, with wife Melinda) has been chartering a spectacular £19¿5million superyacht off the coast of Corsica All mod cons: The Serene, owned by Russian vodka tsar Yuri Scheffler, boasts a gym, cinema, two swimming pools, Jacuzzi, submarine hangar and two helipads CHRISTOPHER STEVENS pays tribute to John Betjeman's daughter Candida Lycett Green | Daily Mail Online comments Candida Lycett Green, pictured, helped found the satirical magazine Private Eye in the early 1960s There’s something about laughter in the face of death, a refusal to take yourself too seriously even at the end, that is peculiarly English.

Candida Lycett Green, the author who died on Tuesday, aged 71, spent her life in love with England, and laughing at herself. The daughter of the Poet Laureate John Betjeman, she helped to found the satirical magazine Private Eye in the early Sixties with several friends, including Peter Cook and editor Richard Ingrams. As many of this hard-drinking, rambunctious crew died during the Nineties, Lycett Green was diagnosed with breast cancer and joked: ‘If I die, Ingrams will have hardly anyone to go to funeral services with.’ She recovered, to the relief of a wide circle of friends in whom she inspired adoration. The campaigning Left-wing journalist Paul Foot had called her ‘the most beautiful woman in Oxford’ during her student days and in Swinging London she was close to actor Terence Stamp, gambler John Aspinall, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger. Indeed, she sometimes said that her great regret in life was that she hadn’t ‘gone the whole hog’ with the Rolling Stone. But it is as a writer, not a socialite, that she will be remembered.

Her books included a memoir, Over The Hills And Far Away; a guide to the capital’s disappearing architecture called Goodbye London, and Unwrecked England, a collection of her columns in the Oldie magazine. A close friend of Prince Charles, she wrote the definitive handbook to his Gloucestershire estate, The Gardens At Highgrove. She was a war baby, born in 1942, and as a child lived at Uffington in the Vale of the White Horse where her family’s cottage was overlooked by the ancient chalk carving. Her father, whose imagination was fired by steam trains and cricket on the green, instilled a love of English heritage in her. Childhood car journeys on holiday to Cornwall used to take four days, as Betjeman stopped to examine every canal lock, parish church and tumbledown farmhouse. RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share ‘England is my nirvana,’ she said. ‘I will never tire of exploring it. Compared with any other country, its variety is astonishing.

One minute you can be high in great, gloomy, rugged moorland and the next deep in a verdant valley with thatched cottages strung along the fern-banked lanes.’ All her life she would revisit Trebetherick in Cornwall, reliving the family pilgrimage. She felt the memories defined her soul. Her father, though he was content to stop for hours to inspect cathedrals and abandoned railway stations, would lose his temper if their battered Vauxhall got stuck in a narrow country lane behind a lorry. ‘He used the word “bloody” a lot,’ she said. Betjeman’s idea of fun was to tell his daughter that she must marry his friend John Sparrow, a crusty old Oxford don. She was not sure if this was a joke, but she had no intention of obeying — she rarely did anything she was told as a child. An enthusiastic rider, one of her favourite games in summer was to gallop through fields of corn, often seriously damaging the crop. ‘I was very naughty, and behaved pretty badly really,’ she recalled gleefully.

Candida Lycett Green, second left, was the daughter of John Betjeman, left, pictured at their home in Farnborough around 1948 with her brother Paul and mother Penelope - and dog Peter Pudding This idyllic childhood ended in 1954, when she was sent to boarding school. ‘I was a revolutionary at heart,’ she said, ‘so I hated it.’ A half-hearted attempt to study sculpture at Oxford Polytechnic followed, before she joined Richard Ingrams and others including David Dimbleby and Auberon Waugh at the Edinburgh Fringe. Self-deprecating as ever, she claimed she had earned a place in their Town And Gown revue because the producer had heard her singing in the bath. What he was doing in her bathroom, she never attempted to explain. A few months later, in London, during a short-lived stint as a magazine sub-editor, she met Savile Row tailor Rupert Lycett Green. An obsessive gambler who played poker till the small hours, he played backgammon with customers in the window of his shop.

His designs ushered in the multi-coloured peacock attire of the Sixties, with gold-embroidered jackets and rainbow ties. His shop did for men what Mary Quant was doing for women, offering ‘a young man’s view of cut and proportion’. As a child, Candida, pictured, was an enthusiastic horse rider who rarely obeyed her parents' wishes Candida claimed it was his flair on the dance-floor that won her heart, but it was also his cavalier sense of adventure. He had a sporty Mini Cooper, and drove it so violently that Candida’s beehive hairdo would collapse as he took corners. They married and on honeymoon attempted to drive around the world in a Land Rover. It was stoned by locals in Tripoli, held up at gunpoint in Kabul, and overturned in Rajasthan in India. In Damascus, the newlyweds found themselves in a military coup, and in Beirut they were adopted by Ba’ath separatists who took them clubbing at the city’s decadent Folies Bergeres club. Back in London, they were more fashionable than ever. Painter David Hockney wanted a Lycett Green suit, and in lieu of payment did a drawing of Candida.

Her magazine career, though, was scuppered when the editor caught her working for his rival, Private Eye — although her job was stapling the pages together and handing out advertising on the Tube. But no Betjeman would be deterred that easily from writing. As her family grew — she and Rupert had five children — she did what her father had done and started writing bedtime stories. These became the basis of two children’s books about Hadrian the Hedgehog. Candida, centre, pictured alongside author Jilly Cooper, left and the Duchess of Cornwall, right, was a close friend of the Prince of Wales and even wrote the definitive guide to the gardens of his Highgrove Estate In 1970, angry that her husband had gone to the football World Cup in Mexico with a group of friends, she persuaded the editor of the Evening Standard to send her to the tournament as the paper’s Cultural Correspondent by arguing that football was the purest form of cultural achievement. She spent most of her time partying with the England squad’s wives.

In the Seventies, she took over Private Eye’s architecture column, Nooks and Corners, from her father, and began a passionate defence of England’s buildings that would last the rest of her life. She became a commissioner for English Heritage with a special enthusiasm for protecting churches and cathedrals — a role that would have thrilled her father. He died in 1984, and she spent the rest of the Eighties editing his letters. She celebrated allotments, cooling towers and seaside resorts — and presented BBC documentaries on the suburban front garden, and the nation’s love of horses, as well as a series for Channel 4 on the cottages of England. Both the gardens and the cottages inspired spin-off books that became best-sellers and provided valuable income, because the family finances were often shaky. Candida married Rupert Lycett Green, left who was a tailor based in London's Savile Row Candida Lycett Green was a fierce defender of the monarchy, once writing to the The Times to declare indignantly that no Hollywood star had ever been half so much in demand as the Queen, who received countless requests to attend every kind of event, from international summits to children’s parties.

After being diagnosed with breast cancer, her matter-of-fact courage was an inspiration to countless women. After recovering, she undertook a 200-mile journey on horseback to raise £125,000 for the complementary care centre at the Churchill cancer hospital in Oxford. Last year she was told she had inoperable cancer of the pancreas and would live just a few months. Her response was as wry as ever. Exasperated that the disease came so low down the league table of research as to be ‘the Sheffield Wednesday of tumours’, she began fund-raising for more research into pancreatic cancer — too late to help herself but, typically, a life-saver for sufferers in the future. In her introduction to John Betjeman’s letters, she wrote: ‘I love my father and want to show the world how great he was, how he revealed the divine in the ordinary and enriched so many people’s lives.’ She deserves nothing less for her own epitaph.

1000+ images about Sir John Betjeman on Pinterest | Statue of, Cornwall and Covent garden Pinterest • The world’s catalog of ideas Sir John Betjeman Sir John Betjeman, CBE (28 Aug 1906 – 19 May 1984) was an English poet, writer, and broadcaster who described himself in Who's Who as a "poet and hack". He was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1972 until his death. He was a founding member of the Victorian Society and a passionate defender of Victorian architecture. He began his career as a journalist and ended it as one of the most popular British Poets Laureate and a much-loved figure on British television. 101 Pins424 Followers

Question: Author Candida Lycett Green died in August. Which poet was her father
Answer: John Betjeman